I started playing again a few nights ago (10 day trial) and I'm pretty disappointed. Pandaria is beautiful (including the dungeons, which are aesthetically great). The leveling is ok. Random stuff in the world to find is fun. Being forced to use ground mounts until 90 was an excellent decision. But that's where my list of good things ends.

1. The Social Experience is (almost) Gone

Not once during this process did I have to be social. I queued, said nothing, did the dungeon, and left. 'But that was your choice', you might say. Well, yes, it was. And I made that choice because the majority of social investments made in this game are nullified by menu options and cross-realm mechanics. I'm not going to invest in building a social relationship if I know I'm probably never going to see that person again.

This is compounded by the lack of reliance on other people. Warlocks brought summons, mages brought food, some people had enchanting (and you had to get enchants in person) etc etc. We've moved into a state of almost complete non-reliance on other people. This is a bad thing. One of the main reasons we are social creatures is because we need other people in order to accomplish tasks, not only for defeating enemies but also to improve oneself. This, combined with the lack of social investment mentioned above, make it pointless, even stupid at times, to be social in this game.

I think it's useful to here mention the adage 'bring the player, not the class'. I don't think this is true. The class brings flavor, and creates reliance, and creates a demand for people's unique skills and thus for social activity. Classes are highly homogenous now in what they can accomplish. It's important for each class to have well-defined strengths that the player can attempt to exploit and well-defined weaknesses that they can try to minimize. These well-defined characteristics are mostly gone, because every class can do a little bit of everything.

2. Content Overwhelming

There's a lot of content in Mists, and there's a problem with it. The problem might not be the quantity, but rather its presentation.

Questing has evolved drastically. Now, we have a hub of quests designated to a specific part of a zone with the zone divided entirely into little parts. It's not the worst system. But it's pretty close. Questing is the single player experience. It should be as epic as multiplayer content, but right now it's just a mandatory prerequisite that few people enjoy (I do enjoy it though). A better design would be to reduce the number of quests, but make each more meaningful. Again, if we aren't investing anything in the questing process (emotionally or otherwise), we won't enjoy it nearly as much. Don't make me go to the bottom of a lake to collect 10 pieces of amber AND THEN give me increased swim speed and underwater breathing. Why would you do that? You just seriously devalued this quest. Make me work harder to collect 2 pieces of amber. Make me have to come up for air. The time it takes might even be the same. But now I feel like I'm doing something.

Dungeons suffer from a similar problem. They're too short. They don't have complex pathways (actually incredibly linear...). Getting lost in dungeons forces us to reach out to other people for help. Not knowing the way, not knowing mechanics forces us to ask. Reliance, again, is crucial. And again, if you place higher value on the content, we as players won't feel the need to rush through it, ignoring all of the aspects of the game that make it an otherworldly experience.

Raids. Raids are okay with one major exception - Raid Finder. It has to go. Not having access to content drives people to gain access to it. If you walk by that instance portal every day and think of what you don't have, attaining it will be incredibly rewarding (and force you to socialize - the reliance on guild members is the last real form of reliance in the game, and even it is being eroded). If it's just a menu option, you don't think twice. And then when you get inside the raid, you don't talk to anyone. You just do your rotation and then leave.

There are also too many difficulty levels in raids. I hit 95 and was overwhelmed by the options - and I didn't know which one was the 'right' one for me.

Do we really need seven tiers at any one time? No. But the problem here runs deeper. By having so many tiers of gear, we as players are forced to focus on that which is only the highest attainable ilvl for us and ignore the rest of the content. What's the point of all that content if so few people see it, and more importantly, understand it?

3. Challenge Level - Unmotivated

Items are too easy to get. If they're easy to get, their value goes down. Simple economics. Make them harder to get, and we might actually bother to read the item's name. I'm mostly looking at timeless isle here. I don't have a solution; but I know that 2 hours and 15 epics is not a valid equation for the success of a game.

Providing both challenging and unchallenging modes of content will result in a watering-down of the content's value. There is no thrill to raid finder. And because everyone can see the content, the exclusivity is diminished and thus the accomplishments feel diminished.

Questing is not epic. It's 'do these chores, don't worry, they're slightly different from the 300 others you just finished'. Quality and immersion should be key here, not quantity.

4. Exploration

I'll be brief here: exploration is in serious trouble. A lot of this is because zones are saturated with quest material. Anywhere you go, the mobs there are probably for a quest. This immediately signals to us that it is not novel information, and exploration is not involved (BECAUSE questing is so linear). Having non-linear hubs is damage control, and it's poor damage control because the exclamation marks are on the map (...).

Exploration means going out into the wilderness, where there is nothing, or something. You don't know. What you do know is that you're doing it to escape the guiding hand that pushes you along the quest line. If you're guided to a spot (especially by economic coercion, which in this case is xp and money), it's no longer exploration.

-------------------------

I see what's happened to this game as a form of capitalism. The emotional aspects of it have been drawn out and away either through removing benefits or providing incentives that lead to antisocial behavior. Gear maximization is the only goal, not character building. This is not a single player game. You can't remove its emotional and social aspects, and expect to succeed in the long run.

Wow was for him and many other people, Challenge for reward is how MOST GAMES DO IT. The fact is, WoW is just reward now. It is in our nature to appreciate things more if we worked hard for them. If we were handed out things for free we wouldn't appreciate what we have more and the story of why its there.

I agree 100% with everything the OP said and I don't know how Blizzard can fix this now. Even stuff like Transmog and Flying Mounts I feel dampened the experience for me.

Everything is easy, everything is picked for you, and everything is broken.

problem is if Blizzard backtracks and tries to make the experience like WotLK and before, people will QQ like no other and whine about it. Who plays a game that doesn't feel rewarding in any way and when blizzard tries to challenge you whines that they would rather get everything for free?

If Blizzard backtracks, it will cleanse the game of the stupidity and whiny brats and bring back all the true hardcore WoW fans that loved this game before Cata. Which I think would make the game healthier overall. sure, maybe less subs, but at least its healthy... If blizzard keeps following this path WoW will eventually just become a empty husk instead of dropping subs in a healthy way all the people who loved wow will stick with it until the end if Blizzard returns to their ways.

Just my two cents.

Hey idiot, post your Armory, boss kills. Show us how easy it is for you.

I completely agree OP. The game does not feel challenging except heroic raiding and if you have a low ilvl for normals near the end of completing the raid.

Cata heroics where a nice step in the right direction but the amount of people not liking a challenge ruined it.

There's a reason the game is bleeding subs. You make the game easy which allows you to get everything you want/need without as much effort as you use to need to acquire items, you get bored and this move to other games.

I completely agree OP. The game does not feel challenging except heroic raiding and if you have a low ilvl for normals near the end of completing the raid.

Cata heroics where a nice step in the right direction but the amount of people not liking a challenge ruined it.

There's a reason the game is bleeding subs. You make the game easy which allows you to get everything you want/need without as much effort as you use to need to acquire items, you get bored and this move to other games.

Maybe blizzard will figure it out before they reach 2 million subs

I agree 100%, I doubt blizzard will care, once the game drops to near zero subs they will just discontinue it.

Dungeons(I felt like this needed it's own space)? Oh my fucking god, what have they done? Dungeons used to be meaningful , fun, challenging and a key into the actual endgame. What are they now? Useless and boring. They are now just mass aoe fest, with a straight patern, easy bosses and overall useless(not only the normals, but also heroics). Nowadays, you can realistically, after you hit max level just go to the AH, buy a couple of pieces to raise your iLvl , go do LFR and you're set. Damn.

Now that we got most of those points out of the way we can move to the biggest problem: progression. Now this is a big one and honestly the one that has killed WoW for me the past 2 expansions, it's the progression or lack of it.

Levelling is quick because people wanted it that. If it was more difficult and more of a grind, other people will complain. Look at the reputation before the changes, it was a long grind. Many people I knew only had one char with the rep because they could not stand long grind. If it was difficult, then it would be even more tedious.

Dungeons is just now just a quick gearing. Making it hard or difficult will just make people complain. I recall people were moaning about WoTLK dungeons. Then came HoR-H. Remember that one? Tanks and healers would normally just drop once they see it because it was such a pain to do with PUGs. You want dungeons where tanks and healers would automatically drop queue? Bring back organize groups for dungeons? Make it harder and longer to gear up alts?

Many things sounds better on paper. They may even be fun for a short while but after 2nd or 3rd time, people just want it done as quickly as possible.

Your point #1 nicely captures my feelings - I don't mind the change in mechanics, but Bizzard's seeming loss of focus on what made the game social is what is most apparent to me. Not sure it's something that can be reversed, but I do miss it.

I started playing again a few nights ago (10 day trial) and I'm pretty disappointed. Pandaria is beautiful (including the dungeons, which are aesthetically great). The leveling is ok. Random stuff in the world to find is fun. Being forced to use ground mounts until 90 was an excellent decision. But that's where my list of good things ends.

1. The Social Experience is (almost) Gone

Not once during this process did I have to be social. I queued, said nothing, did the dungeon, and left. 'But that was your choice', you might say. Well, yes, it was. And I made that choice because the majority of social investments made in this game are nullified by menu options and cross-realm mechanics. I'm not going to invest in building a social relationship if I know I'm probably never going to see that person again.

This is compounded by the lack of reliance on other people. Warlocks brought summons, mages brought food, some people had enchanting (and you had to get enchants in person) etc etc. We've moved into a state of almost complete non-reliance on other people. This is a bad thing. One of the main reasons we are social creatures is because we need other people in order to accomplish tasks, not only for defeating enemies but also to improve oneself. This, combined with the lack of social investment mentioned above, make it pointless, even stupid at times, to be social in this game.

I think it's useful to here mention the adage 'bring the player, not the class'. I don't think this is true. The class brings flavor, and creates reliance, and creates a demand for people's unique skills and thus for social activity. Classes are highly homogenous now in what they can accomplish. It's important for each class to have well-defined strengths that the player can attempt to exploit and well-defined weaknesses that they can try to minimize. These well-defined characteristics are mostly gone, because every class can do a little bit of everything.

2. Content Overwhelming

There's a lot of content in Mists, and there's a problem with it. The problem might not be the quantity, but rather its presentation.

Questing has evolved drastically. Now, we have a hub of quests designated to a specific part of a zone with the zone divided entirely into little parts. It's not the worst system. But it's pretty close. Questing is the single player experience. It should be as epic as multiplayer content, but right now it's just a mandatory prerequisite that few people enjoy (I do enjoy it though). A better design would be to reduce the number of quests, but make each more meaningful. Again, if we aren't investing anything in the questing process (emotionally or otherwise), we won't enjoy it nearly as much. Don't make me go to the bottom of a lake to collect 10 pieces of amber AND THEN give me increased swim speed and underwater breathing. Why would you do that? You just seriously devalued this quest. Make me work harder to collect 2 pieces of amber. Make me have to come up for air. The time it takes might even be the same. But now I feel like I'm doing something.

Dungeons suffer from a similar problem. They're too short. They don't have complex pathways (actually incredibly linear...). Getting lost in dungeons forces us to reach out to other people for help. Not knowing the way, not knowing mechanics forces us to ask. Reliance, again, is crucial. And again, if you place higher value on the content, we as players won't feel the need to rush through it, ignoring all of the aspects of the game that make it an otherworldly experience.

Raids. Raids are okay with one major exception - Raid Finder. It has to go. Not having access to content drives people to gain access to it. If you walk by that instance portal every day and think of what you don't have, attaining it will be incredibly rewarding (and force you to socialize - the reliance on guild members is the last real form of reliance in the game, and even it is being eroded). If it's just a menu option, you don't think twice. And then when you get inside the raid, you don't talk to anyone. You just do your rotation and then leave.

There are also too many difficulty levels in raids. I hit 95 and was overwhelmed by the options - and I didn't know which one was the 'right' one for me.

Do we really need seven tiers at any one time? No. But the problem here runs deeper. By having so many tiers of gear, we as players are forced to focus on that which is only the highest attainable ilvl for us and ignore the rest of the content. What's the point of all that content if so few people see it, and more importantly, understand it?

3. Challenge Level - Unmotivated

Items are too easy to get. If they're easy to get, their value goes down. Simple economics. Make them harder to get, and we might actually bother to read the item's name. I'm mostly looking at timeless isle here. I don't have a solution; but I know that 2 hours and 15 epics is not a valid equation for the success of a game.

Providing both challenging and unchallenging modes of content will result in a watering-down of the content's value. There is no thrill to raid finder. And because everyone can see the content, the exclusivity is diminished and thus the accomplishments feel diminished.

Questing is not epic. It's 'do these chores, don't worry, they're slightly different from the 300 others you just finished'. Quality and immersion should be key here, not quantity.

4. Exploration

I'll be brief here: exploration is in serious trouble. A lot of this is because zones are saturated with quest material. Anywhere you go, the mobs there are probably for a quest. This immediately signals to us that it is not novel information, and exploration is not involved (BECAUSE questing is so linear). Having non-linear hubs is damage control, and it's poor damage control because the exclamation marks are on the map (...).

Exploration means going out into the wilderness, where there is nothing, or something. You don't know. What you do know is that you're doing it to escape the guiding hand that pushes you along the quest line. If you're guided to a spot (especially by economic coercion, which in this case is xp and money), it's no longer exploration.

-------------------------

I see what's happened to this game as a form of capitalism. The emotional aspects of it have been drawn out and away either through removing benefits or providing incentives that lead to antisocial behavior. Gear maximization is the only goal, not character building. This is not a single player game. You can't remove its emotional and social aspects, and expect to succeed in the long run.

So quests are too linear but multiple gearing paths are also bad? This is nothing but a boring self absorbed rant.

Sounds like the only whiny brats are the ones who think this way. Love the statement about making the experience like WotLK. You do realize that WotLK was probably the easiest expansion ever right? Talk about getting everything for free, WotLK was that expansion!

Keep the two cents and use it to buy a clue.

Rofl did you ever faced yogg +0 or lk hc? I gues not you clearly didnt raid end game content.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Marema

That was the best thing they did to this game you mean. Do you want to go back and do heroic MSV/TeS before you can go into heroic SoO? No? Didn't think so.

I stopped reading at progression and difficulty. I like the pve in its current form. I play this game to pvp. Not to bang on monsters that do the same thing over and over.

The pvp needs addressed, not the pve.

If i had a say so id remove or lessen the 70% damage reduction in pvp. Lessen the healing penalty. Spikey burst and people being blown up? Thats called poor gear and something to strive for. Clearly you cant hit people as hard as you do raid bosses so fix the pve. Stop fucking up the pvp. Tbc pvp eas great. I even remember the pvp in vanilla being good.

I dont get why they want to level the playing field so much and make it noob friendly. You have nothing to work for of you can accomplish x with any gear.

Class balance is something that needs to be addresed. Rogues one shotting people for 40 levels is stupid. Low level pvp doesnt matter? It matters to me. I level toons all the time to pvp up because i get bored of 90 pvp. Warrior deep wounds ticks for 1\4 of your health in the 40s. Who worked on the scaling? They need a new job.

Iam a casual now and i 101% agree with you! i level new toon with my girlfriend together and especially the part about leveling hit the needle on the head ( xD dont know to say this in english).

once i raided 5 times a week, now i am fine with only being a casual but there is nothing to show my skill... i can run dungeons with my girl together without takeing a break r stand even still... but that can do a lot of people.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Mush

When people stop liking CoD or really any game they stop playing. When people stop liking WoW they start crying.

Ever think that it is you and not the game?

Granted it has faults, but just stop pining and move on.

As expected, the Blizz-can-do-no-right anti-fanboys are in full force here.

You must see how hypocritical you are.

this is not a good example... CoD doenst change, wow does. i like the game, the graphics, the feeling, the mechanics. i dont like the change of my old quests, the much dmg you do, the much healing you do... CoD is a fistperson shooter. you cant compare this

I stopped reading at progression and difficulty. I like the pve in its current form. I play this game to pvp. Not to bang on monsters that do the same thing over and over.

The pvp needs addressed, not the pve.

If i had a say so id remove or lessen the 70% damage reduction in pvp. Lessen the healing penalty. Spikey burst and people being blown up? Thats called poor gear and something to strive for. Clearly you cant hit people as hard as you do raid bosses so fix the pve. Stop fucking up the pvp. Tbc pvp eas great. I even remember the pvp in vanilla being good.

I dont get why they want to level the playing field so much and make it noob friendly. You have nothing to work for of you can accomplish x with any gear.

Class balance is something that needs to be addresed. Rogues one shotting people for 40 levels is stupid. Low level pvp doesnt matter? It matters to me. I level toons all the time to pvp up because i get bored of 90 pvp. Warrior deep wounds ticks for 1\4 of your health in the 40s. Who worked on the scaling? They need a new job.

Fix the pvp. Pve is fine.

I agree, even though I don't pvp anymore because of how bad it's become. Cata fucked pvp up for me. Being CC'd for 15 seconds has to be the worse design ever. CC should be for pve, like how you had to cc mobs for heroics at the start of cata(When heroics where actually fun).

I started playing again a few nights ago (10 day trial) and I'm pretty disappointed. Pandaria is beautiful (including the dungeons, which are aesthetically great). The leveling is ok. Random stuff in the world to find is fun. Being forced to use ground mounts until 90 was an excellent decision. But that's where my list of good things ends.

1. The Social Experience is (almost) Gone

Not once during this process did I have to be social. I queued, said nothing, did the dungeon, and left. 'But that was your choice', you might say. Well, yes, it was. And I made that choice because the majority of social investments made in this game are nullified by menu options and cross-realm mechanics. I'm not going to invest in building a social relationship if I know I'm probably never going to see that person again.

This is compounded by the lack of reliance on other people. Warlocks brought summons, mages brought food, some people had enchanting (and you had to get enchants in person) etc etc. We've moved into a state of almost complete non-reliance on other people. This is a bad thing. One of the main reasons we are social creatures is because we need other people in order to accomplish tasks, not only for defeating enemies but also to improve oneself. This, combined with the lack of social investment mentioned above, make it pointless, even stupid at times, to be social in this game.

I think it's useful to here mention the adage 'bring the player, not the class'. I don't think this is true. The class brings flavor, and creates reliance, and creates a demand for people's unique skills and thus for social activity. Classes are highly homogenous now in what they can accomplish. It's important for each class to have well-defined strengths that the player can attempt to exploit and well-defined weaknesses that they can try to minimize. These well-defined characteristics are mostly gone, because every class can do a little bit of everything.

2. Content Overwhelming

There's a lot of content in Mists, and there's a problem with it. The problem might not be the quantity, but rather its presentation.

Questing has evolved drastically. Now, we have a hub of quests designated to a specific part of a zone with the zone divided entirely into little parts. It's not the worst system. But it's pretty close. Questing is the single player experience. It should be as epic as multiplayer content, but right now it's just a mandatory prerequisite that few people enjoy (I do enjoy it though). A better design would be to reduce the number of quests, but make each more meaningful. Again, if we aren't investing anything in the questing process (emotionally or otherwise), we won't enjoy it nearly as much. Don't make me go to the bottom of a lake to collect 10 pieces of amber AND THEN give me increased swim speed and underwater breathing. Why would you do that? You just seriously devalued this quest. Make me work harder to collect 2 pieces of amber. Make me have to come up for air. The time it takes might even be the same. But now I feel like I'm doing something.

Dungeons suffer from a similar problem. They're too short. They don't have complex pathways (actually incredibly linear...). Getting lost in dungeons forces us to reach out to other people for help. Not knowing the way, not knowing mechanics forces us to ask. Reliance, again, is crucial. And again, if you place higher value on the content, we as players won't feel the need to rush through it, ignoring all of the aspects of the game that make it an otherworldly experience.

Raids. Raids are okay with one major exception - Raid Finder. It has to go. Not having access to content drives people to gain access to it. If you walk by that instance portal every day and think of what you don't have, attaining it will be incredibly rewarding (and force you to socialize - the reliance on guild members is the last real form of reliance in the game, and even it is being eroded). If it's just a menu option, you don't think twice. And then when you get inside the raid, you don't talk to anyone. You just do your rotation and then leave.

There are also too many difficulty levels in raids. I hit 95 and was overwhelmed by the options - and I didn't know which one was the 'right' one for me.

Do we really need seven tiers at any one time? No. But the problem here runs deeper. By having so many tiers of gear, we as players are forced to focus on that which is only the highest attainable ilvl for us and ignore the rest of the content. What's the point of all that content if so few people see it, and more importantly, understand it?

3. Challenge Level - Unmotivated

Items are too easy to get. If they're easy to get, their value goes down. Simple economics. Make them harder to get, and we might actually bother to read the item's name. I'm mostly looking at timeless isle here. I don't have a solution; but I know that 2 hours and 15 epics is not a valid equation for the success of a game.

Providing both challenging and unchallenging modes of content will result in a watering-down of the content's value. There is no thrill to raid finder. And because everyone can see the content, the exclusivity is diminished and thus the accomplishments feel diminished.

Questing is not epic. It's 'do these chores, don't worry, they're slightly different from the 300 others you just finished'. Quality and immersion should be key here, not quantity.

4. Exploration

I'll be brief here: exploration is in serious trouble. A lot of this is because zones are saturated with quest material. Anywhere you go, the mobs there are probably for a quest. This immediately signals to us that it is not novel information, and exploration is not involved (BECAUSE questing is so linear). Having non-linear hubs is damage control, and it's poor damage control because the exclamation marks are on the map (...).

Exploration means going out into the wilderness, where there is nothing, or something. You don't know. What you do know is that you're doing it to escape the guiding hand that pushes you along the quest line. If you're guided to a spot (especially by economic coercion, which in this case is xp and money), it's no longer exploration.

-------------------------

I see what's happened to this game as a form of capitalism. The emotional aspects of it have been drawn out and away either through removing benefits or providing incentives that lead to antisocial behavior. Gear maximization is the only goal, not character building. This is not a single player game. You can't remove its emotional and social aspects, and expect to succeed in the long run.

This is a beautiful post, thanks for the effort to formulate the points in detail!

Many points are even true for games in general. There is a reason why Skyrim is praised

The leveling experience is so easy now. I died 2 times in Elwynn on a classic server (with time travel of course and not a silly private project) in that spider cave. Epic. I died more than once in redridge in that castle and i had a blast with my 3 hour deadmines journey (sadly the time travel machine is broken and not every mob worked correctly). The thing is: Don't believe the fanbois that we are crazy. No, WoW was really that great. It was big, immersive and dangerous - a great experience from the beginning. Todays leveling experience is a bad joke. I rather play a browser game than leveling a new toon. Oh wait, instant 85 available? Did Blizzard stole this idea from that silly private projects?! Oh wait, i did not mention them!

I started playing again a few nights ago (10 day trial) and I'm pretty disappointed. Pandaria is beautiful (including the dungeons, which are aesthetically great). The leveling is ok. Random stuff in the world to find is fun. Being forced to use ground mounts until 90 was an excellent decision. But that's where my list of good things ends.

1. The Social Experience is (almost) Gone

Not once during this process did I have to be social. I queued, said nothing, did the dungeon, and left. 'But that was your choice', you might say. Well, yes, it was. And I made that choice because the majority of social investments made in this game are nullified by menu options and cross-realm mechanics. I'm not going to invest in building a social relationship if I know I'm probably never going to see that person again.

This is compounded by the lack of reliance on other people. Warlocks brought summons, mages brought food, some people had enchanting (and you had to get enchants in person) etc etc. We've moved into a state of almost complete non-reliance on other people. This is a bad thing. One of the main reasons we are social creatures is because we need other people in order to accomplish tasks, not only for defeating enemies but also to improve oneself. This, combined with the lack of social investment mentioned above, make it pointless, even stupid at times, to be social in this game.

I think it's useful to here mention the adage 'bring the player, not the class'. I don't think this is true. The class brings flavor, and creates reliance, and creates a demand for people's unique skills and thus for social activity. Classes are highly homogenous now in what they can accomplish. It's important for each class to have well-defined strengths that the player can attempt to exploit and well-defined weaknesses that they can try to minimize. These well-defined characteristics are mostly gone, because every class can do a little bit of everything.

There was nothing stopping you from forming a group manually. That's like choosing to go to a fast food joint instead of sit down restaurant and complaining that you didn't get enough quality service. You choose efficiency over immersion/character relationships. Now as a new player, you may not be aware that you can do that, which is certainly a problem, but by no means is it indicative that the system is what's the issue.

I don't quite understand your second point. Warlocks still bring summons and mages still bring food. You still have to get an enchanter to enchant things, but it's a little easier in that you can enchant a scroll and give it out. That's a huge logistic burden gone. If anything I'd say people have become MORE reliant on others. Have you ever tried to pug the world bosses? People will literally sit there and spam INV FOR CELESTIALS/ORDOS, forever until you invite them, but at no point do they ever try to make the group for themselves. So I still don't quite understand this point.

I really don't know why you're arguing this point. Being able to take any class for a role is awesome. Not being able to kill a boss because one of your shamans didn't show up is lame as hell. Classes are still pretty unique and make a lot of difference sometimes.

For instance, paladins make single tanking a lot more feasible
Rogues on heroic Council of Elders could completely negate an ability drastically changing the difficulty of the fight.
Warlock portal on heroic Iron Qon was HUGE when the tier was new. It was very good even at the end.
Warlock portal on heroic Lei Shen
Resto shamans in cataclysm on herioc spine of deathwing(Not having SLT for heroic spine was almost a death sentence depending on your lineup)

Those are just a handful I thought of off the top of my head. Classes are still plenty unique.

2. Content Overwhelming

There's a lot of content in Mists, and there's a problem with it. The problem might not be the quantity, but rather its presentation.

Questing has evolved drastically. Now, we have a hub of quests designated to a specific part of a zone with the zone divided entirely into little parts. It's not the worst system. But it's pretty close. Questing is the single player experience. It should be as epic as multiplayer content, but right now it's just a mandatory prerequisite that few people enjoy (I do enjoy it though). A better design would be to reduce the number of quests, but make each more meaningful. Again, if we aren't investing anything in the questing process (emotionally or otherwise), we won't enjoy it nearly as much. Don't make me go to the bottom of a lake to collect 10 pieces of amber AND THEN give me increased swim speed and underwater breathing. Why would you do that? You just seriously devalued this quest. Make me work harder to collect 2 pieces of amber. Make me have to come up for air. The time it takes might even be the same. But now I feel like I'm doing something.

Dungeons suffer from a similar problem. They're too short. They don't have complex pathways (actually incredibly linear...). Getting lost in dungeons forces us to reach out to other people for help. Not knowing the way, not knowing mechanics forces us to ask. Reliance, again, is crucial. And again, if you place higher value on the content, we as players won't feel the need to rush through it, ignoring all of the aspects of the game that make it an otherworldly experience.

Raids. Raids are okay with one major exception - Raid Finder. It has to go. Not having access to content drives people to gain access to it. If you walk by that instance portal every day and think of what you don't have, attaining it will be incredibly rewarding (and force you to socialize - the reliance on guild members is the last real form of reliance in the game, and even it is being eroded). If it's just a menu option, you don't think twice. And then when you get inside the raid, you don't talk to anyone. You just do your rotation and then leave.

There are also too many difficulty levels in raids. I hit 95 and was overwhelmed by the options - and I didn't know which one was the 'right' one for me.

Do we really need seven tiers at any one time? No. But the problem here runs deeper. By having so many tiers of gear, we as players are forced to focus on that which is only the highest attainable ilvl for us and ignore the rest of the content. What's the point of all that content if so few people see it, and more importantly, understand it?

I agree with you here. Questing needs an overhaul. Mindlessly doing the same quests that you just did but with minor variations is not fun nor compelling.

How can you say dungeons are too linear yet you somehow get lost? If it's too linear it's impossible to get lost, you're either going towards the end or the beginning. Not knowing mechanics forces you to interact with people and you complaining about that? I thought you problem was that there WASN'T a social atmosphere. You said that questing was too easy and boring, but you don't like the fact that you have to ask if you don't know a mechanic? At the very least it's a unique mechanic adding some freshness.

Not having access to content does not drive people to it, that is a fallacy. That only works if the content is appealing to them to begin with. The people using raid finder wouldn't be raiding otherwise. They weren't interested in normal mode then, and if you remove LFR they won't be interested in it either. I actually had a long coversation a few days ago with a predominately LFR raider on my server. He's got 10+ clears of everything in LFR, but maybe 1 or 2 in normal. I even asked him this exact question and even he agreed. Had it not been for LFR, he said he would have never gotten involved with raiding, and the only reason he's starting to do normal now is because he feels like he can push his skills further thanks to LFR. Removing LFR is a terrible idea.

You say there are too many raid difficulties and then proceed to make a list filled half of non raid categories. You're looking at it the wrong way if you think there's too many. You have Timeless Isle with 499/535 gear(Burdens), which is completely solo for all intents and purposes(Running up to a rare and tagging it while other people kill it, I don't consider as grouped). I will agree that 5mans have fallen out of use which is unfortunate and scenarios are all but useless unless you have very good RNG.

The only thing that leaves is LFR/flex which for the most part are all the same. I'm not really sure how that's confusing. You have LFR as the lowest level of raid difficulty that you can pick up whenever you want, then there's flex that allows for variable sizes groups so you don't have to exlude people anymore. Normal/heroic are probably beyond you at the moment if you're having trouble grasping the previous difficultly levels( I don't mean that as an insult, rather that they just aren't relevant to a new player like yourself, so for the time being you can exclude them)

3. Challenge Level - Unmotivated

Items are too easy to get. If they're easy to get, their value goes down. Simple economics. Make them harder to get, and we might actually bother to read the item's name. I'm mostly looking at timeless isle here. I don't have a solution; but I know that 2 hours and 15 epics is not a valid equation for the success of a game.

Providing both challenging and unchallenging modes of content will result in a watering-down of the content's value. There is no thrill to raid finder. And because everyone can see the content, the exclusivity is diminished and thus the accomplishments feel diminished.

Questing is not epic. It's 'do these chores, don't worry, they're slightly different from the 300 others you just finished'. Quality and immersion should be key here, not quantity.

Timeless Isle is designed as catch up. You're SUPPOSED to gear up quickly. That's why the gear is only ilvl 496 so as not to diminish the gear you get from the current tier. The only thing this does is allow you to start a character at ilvl 496 essentially, instead of having to waste time gearing up in previous raids/LFR. You could say that that isn't fun and you'd rather progress naturally; well that option is open to you. The thing you need to understand is that this is at the END of the expansion. A lot of what you want won't be there because more players are tired of redoing the same content over and over than there are new players. So successive patches are going to make it easier to get to a point where you can become relevant to the current tier quickly. This doesn't mean you'll fly through the current tier, just means that you can spend more time on the tier itself and not the ones before it.

Having easy content does not diminish harder content, this is another fallacy. Raid finder was never exclusive to begin with, so I don't know what the issue is there. Whether raid finder exists or not doesn't diminish my heroic Garrosh achievement.

I agree with your statement on quests 100%. Quality and immersion DEFINITELY should be driving factors.

4. Exploration

I'll be brief here: exploration is in serious trouble. A lot of this is because zones are saturated with quest material. Anywhere you go, the mobs there are probably for a quest. This immediately signals to us that it is not novel information, and exploration is not involved (BECAUSE questing is so linear). Having non-linear hubs is damage control, and it's poor damage control because the exclamation marks are on the map (...).

Exploration means going out into the wilderness, where there is nothing, or something. You don't know. What you do know is that you're doing it to escape the guiding hand that pushes you along the quest line. If you're guided to a spot (especially by economic coercion, which in this case is xp and money), it's no longer exploration.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from exploring. Can you explore and do any quest you wish? No, but that has more to do with phasing and how the zone is supposed to progress dynamically as you quest through it. In order for that to work you kind of have to go linearly or you risking breaking immersion. You can still explore as you wish and see everything and then go back and quest, or you could do it AS you quest.

The one thing I will agree with you on that subject though, is the excitement of not knowing what's going to be there is nice. However, even if that were the case, the instant you do it it's not longer "new", so every subsequent time after is going to be just as boring. So as you can see the real problem is still there either way.

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I see what's happened to this game as a form of capitalism. The emotional aspects of it have been drawn out and away either through removing benefits or providing incentives that lead to antisocial behavior. Gear maximization is the only goal, not character building. This is not a single player game. You can't remove its emotional and social aspects, and expect to succeed in the long run.

A lot of those changes are QoL changes that DID make the game better. Because people decided to twist them into how they are today is not indicative of a flawed system. People are the problem, not the system in place.

What's really frightening is that we seem to be getting more and more players that do not want to play with other people. It's an MMO, there's a certain level of interaction that has to happen in order to function properly. However people are coming into this game without thinking about that. I personally think it's because they made leveling so easy. If you spend 90 levels solo and never once NEED to group with someone, then once you hit max level your perception is going to be that you should be able to do it solo.

Another thing is people approach WoW VERY differently. To some people it's a game, to others a hobby. There is a very large distinction in that and I think that's where most of the misinformation stems from.